Rice Pursuing New Tales of the Vampire Film?

The life of PandoraIf you thought Queen of the Damned was the final nail in the coffin when it came to Anne Rice-inspired bloodsucker flicks, think again. An insider tells ShockTillYouDrop.com that Rice is actively pushing to get her novel Pandora onto the screen.

Published in ’98, the novel was the first in Rice’s proposed “New Tales of the Vampire” series which continued with Vittorio the following year. Here’s a synopsis for Pandora provided by AnneRice.com.

Fledgling vampire David Talbot has set out to become a chronicler of his fellow Undead. The novel opens in present-day Paris in a crowded cafe, where David meets Pandora. She is two thousand years old, a Child of the Millennia, the first vampire ever made by the great Marius. David persuades her to tell the story of her life.

Pandora begins, reluctantly at first and then with increasing passion, to recount her mesmerizing tale, which takes us through the ages, from Imperial Rome to eighteenth-century France to twentieth-century Paris and New Orleans. She carries us back to her mortal girlhood in the world of Caesar Augustus, a world chronicled by Ovid and Petronius. This is where Pandora meets and falls in love with the handsome, charismatic, lighthearted, still-mortal Marius. This is the Rome she is forced to flee in fear of assassination by conspirators plotting to take over the city. And we follow her to the exotic port of Antioch, where she is destined to be reunited with Marius, now immortal and haunted by his vampire nature, who will bestow on her the Dark Gift as they set out on the fraught and fantastic adventure of their two turbulent centuries together.

Shock hopes to receive a confirmation or otherwise about this news soon.